Etcher is a cross-platform free tool that burns images to SD cards or USB flash drives safely and securely. It’s offered as beta releases for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS systems at the moment with the support for multiple imaging formats, including ISO, IMG, Disk, and compressed images.

With so many similar tools out there, Etcher is a new player on the field with two strengths, the beautiful face and strong validation.

It’s an open source made with JS, HTML, node.js and Electron, so the interface is made quite pretty and in a way that makes the process very easy to follow. Burning an image to the flash drive is as easy as 1-2-3.

What really makes Etcher stand out and worth using is its strong validation feature. It validates the data after the flashing process to avoid writing images on a corrupted card or flash drive. It’s an important step to make sure the whole flashing process succeed without future failure of using the media. But users can still disable the validation option to get a faster process if needed.

When the process is finished, it displays a final page showing whether the process completed successfully with a CRC32 checksum and the options to flash more with the same image or a new one.

Verdict

Etcher is a nicely built, easy-to-use, and reliable tool for burning images to both SD cards and USB flash drives. It has the potential to become a great tool if it supports more features like the support of UEFI and the different file systems, which are available on the other similar tools. And a portable version is also very welcome to have.